I can't afford to upgrade often, or if I can I can only afford little bits, so I drive my hardware into the ground.
I used a 68030 Macintosh paired with a 486DX2 PC until 1999, I used a 450 mhz Pentium II, 320 MB RAM, with Windows 98 until 2005. Then I got an Athlon 64 2.2ghz and 1GB RAM, and I'm still using it now. I've only upgraded with an extra 512 MB of RAM and a very cheap video card to get off the onboard graphics, as well as a second hard drive (200GB) that I didn't pay for because I pulled it from a dead P4 I received. It looks like I'll be using this thing until at least 2011 due to my financial situation, when I'd like to finally plunge and get something nice. Lucky for me that it still works kinda well for its age due to decent upkeep, although it's starting to fall behind for anything that needs decent performance, like games.

I named my first external hard drive "Flying Toaster" due to its portability and my love of the old After Dark screensavers... it died of severe overheating, what a coincidence.
I named its replacement "Not A Toaster"... so far so good.
As for my computers, I have a couple random names but no common theme and definitely no effect on their performance. My main one is called Kefka after the Final Fantasy VI character. I have an old Gateway named Moo and a Dell from 2003 that is named Powerhouse because it is somehow STILL able to play new games on reasonable settings. My old 486 is named Senior Citizen and my equally old Mac is named Crapple because it is very slow and useless.
I used to name ALL my hard drives, but then I stopped. I had on my old Pentium 2 setup a 12 gig named Dust Bunny and a 40 gig named Death Star.
I should get back into naming!

cHALiTO writes: "From the site: The guys over at 24C3 just demoed a Wii hack that is set to provide native Wii
homebrew in the near future (not running in GC mode, and with full access to all the Wii hardware!)
They were able to find encryption and decryption keys by doing full memory
dumps at runtime over a custom serial interface. Using these keys, they were
able to create a Wii 'game' that ran their own code (their demo happened to show live sensor/Wiimote information, amongst a few other things).
Read here and watch video here."

the_humeister writes: According to the AP, New Jersey has just enacted a new law restricting internet access to sex offenders. Now this wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing save for the fact that "sex offender" now covers such a wide range of actions such that getting caught urinating in public can get you such a label.

bryanlb writes: Many users woke up this morning to find their Google Accounts "disabled" for some unknown reason (http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-ABCs/topics). This includes all Google services such as: Gmail, Talk, and Reader among many other services. It is currently unknown what Google is going to do to resolve this issue. Meanwhile, thousands of users are without email over the Christmas Holiday. Merry Christmas.

An anonymous reader writes: Barack Obama, in a speech at Google (youtube link), said that he would "take a back seat to no one" in his support of network neutrality, and said he intends to double Federal funding for science and to make the R&D tax credit permanent. Could Obama be the first mainstream candidate to start understanding geek issues?

Teen Bainwolf writes: Big Four record label EMI is reportedly considering a big cut in its funding for the IFPI and RIAA. Each of the labels reportedly contributed over $130 million per year to fund industry trade groups, and EMI apparently believes that money could be better spent elsewhere. 'One of the chief activities of the RIAA is coordinating the Big Four labels' legal campaign, and those thousands of lawsuits have done nothing but generate ill will from record fans, while costing the labels millions of dollars and doing little (if anything) to actually reduce the amount of file-sharing going on. In fact, the RIAA freely admits that the legal campaign is a real money pit, and EMI's new ownership may be very leery of continuing to pour money down that particular rat hole.

duh P3rf3ss3r writes: Popular bittorrent site Demonoid.com, still smarting from a recent agreement with the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) to block all traffic from Canadians, appears to have been forced entirely offline. Attempts to contact the main or the secondary server result in the message: "The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding." Is this the end for the demonoid folks?

jBubba writes: Windows XP SP3 build 3205 is the first official & authorized release of the next Windows XP service pack; and has been made available to testers as a part of the Windows Server 2008/Windows Vista SP1 beta program. NeoSmart Technologies has the run-down on the included 1,073 patches/hotfixes including security updates. Contrary to popular belief, Windows XP SP3 does ship with new features/components, most of which have been backported from Windows Vista.